Everybody should live life to their full potential Humans are not a battery whose potential has to be drained to zero. They’re sensitive sacks of meats with hopes, dreams, feelings, and emotions. And sometimes your talents and your goals are not in alignment . If you have a 150+ IQ but just want a quiet life as a teacher that’s fine, if you’re a great singer but just want to sing in the balcony, that’s fine . Society wants to define us by one marketable trait and have us exploit it for fame and money. But you should live on your own terms.

Money doesn’t lead to happiness This one we have some studies on. First there was the famous “Happiness saturates after $75k” study” which has been recently challenged with a newer study with better data collection methods showing happiness constantly increasing with income in a log linear fashion . Money is fuel and more fuel can only be a good thing? The problem is most of us don’t know where we want to go, have terrible people along for the ride or are not treating the people on our ride with love and respect . Some of us have gotten into a status game, forgetting that money is just the means, a joyful life is the end! After certain thresholds, money completely loses its conventional meaning.

Find your passion /ikigai and you’ll never work for a day (find a job you love..) This is a popular idea nowadays; finding your true career, that blends your passion, feeds your soul and also pays you a lot - the fabled Ikigai. It is also horseshit . Brought up in different circumstances, given different books, around new friends and in a different economic stratum; all your notions of what you can do and what is good to do will change . Your values were given to you. You are not a spare part manufactured with precision to do a specific thing. You’re a two-legged monkey adapting to things around you . There is no larger purpose for you, but you better find something to do so your existence isn’t boring.

There is a passion/Ideal job out there for you to find Same as previous. Given what you are/have become; there are things you will find enjoyable or tolerable. But if we changed your circumstances, you’d have found something else entirely to be your passion . The real question is, what defines you?

X (Engineering/Management) is a good career in India Engineering education is amongst the biggest scams in India that is starting to wear off. Parents didn’t know better and pushed their kids to get educated by hook or by crook . A good bet generally. Lots of engineering graduates who pride themselves on an engineering degree wouldn’t be able to change a light bulb. The funniest or saddest fact, depending on viewpoint, is that we’ve got no engineering jobs at all! Certainly not enough to absorb all the people we graduate . The biggest absorber of ALL engineering graduates has been the IT industry. Until recently, this IT industry was dominated by service companies doing outsourced grunt work for others . Today product companies are ruling the roost, but even these are a sparse dressing on India’s byzantine infrastructure and lack of scientific and technological progress . We can operate tech companies because American companies are given away all their legos blocks away, sometimes for free. There is zero invention from us . We’re a whole country poor farmers and rich merchants. Even India’s engineers are merchants arbitraging their cheap labour against the high wages in other countries . It’s the only reason we have outposts of many tech companies here.